The Obama administration had advanced warning of possible chemical attacks by the Assad regime in the last year but was able to forestall such an outcome through diplomatic efforts.

That's according to senior administration officials, speaking to reporters after the U.S. released evidence of a chemical-weapons attack last week in the Damascus suburbs. One official said when an attack was imminent, the U.S. deployed either direct messaging to the Assad regime or conducted public diplomacy, which included speeches from President Obama.-------

Obama also dismissed concern Wednesday that his credibility is at risk if the United States fails to intervene in the country following evidence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gassed thousands of his own people last month.

“My credibility is not on the line,” Obama said Wednesday. Instead, Obama said, the international community and the American Congress — who Obama has asked to authorize action in Syria — both face credibility risks.

Yes. You state what you would do on foreign policy, but run with an economic freedom and prosperity focus. Stopping rogue nations from proliferating, threatening, or using dangerous weapons should be a given, not an issue. Obama should have knocked out Iran's nuclear and Syria's chemical stockpile when he learned of them, not after genocide. If the UN security is skewed in favor of oppression and murderous dictators, he should have formed a new group - somewhere in his first 5 years!

This is failed Presidency. There are no such things as prosperity through higher taxes, freedom through larger government programs, or shaping world events by "leading from behind".

"Teddy Roosevelt based his foreign policy on this maxim: "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Obama's foreign policy is based on this maxim: "Speak endlessly and carry a toothpick."

Or was it just - speak endlessly. I didn't see a toothpick.

With danger accelerating in the world, China in a one power arms race, Russia reinvigorated and supporting enemy regimes, the entire Middle East a tinder box and other unknowns, what is the U.S. under Obama doing to prepare for or to deter war? Defense outlays fell 7.6% this year.

"The man who connected so electrically and facilely in 2008, causing Americans to overlook his thin résumé, cannot seem to connect anymore."

Yet his approval ratings if one believes the polls are forever 50% or close to it.

Why the Republicans cannot close in is because they still don't get it.

How do we deal with the "entitlement" crowd? How do we win at least some no whites? How do we stop Hillary from winning 50% of the electorate for no reason other than her sex? (I guess being bisexual gives her a double advantage - not that we didn't already know. ). I would be very curious to know if other(s) on this board including Rachel would give me insight to the power of the "women's vote".

We should not underestimate this! From talking with women in my family to those I work with I can tell you there is no question there is an unlocked political tsunami in addressing women's imaginations. If Repubs don't fully grasp this then Hillary sure will. I sat with four female relatives from two generations three who are left and one who is right on the political spectrum. They will all tell me women are not treated the same, do not have the same opportunity make less money and all the rest.

My response is I don't get it. Women now can choose (if economically feasible) to stay home, to work, get time off for pregnancy, for family care, get benefits for their kids, more lawyers now are female, more are doctors, they run for high office. And yet they still bitch? Their response - I just don't see it. Like the men in their lives.

So do not underestimate the Hillary - women's thing. It will be big. Big enough - only time will tell. Dredging up all the stuff we know about Bill and Hill - like today's Gennifer Flowers thing will not persuade anyone that is already not persuaded. It will take more. Rove doesn't get it. Bushes don't get it. Cruz is closest for me.

The non-reporting of this Glibness story should go in Media Issues. I googled this fact and found it only in the original source, buried deep in the story, and all the rest were right wing sources. When George Bush's approval hit the 30s, it was front and center, then he lost Congress and we lost the country.

In spite of the lapdog media, the era of Hyde Park Hope and Change is over, in terms of public opinion.

It's not uncommon for some on the right to sniff dictatorial tendencies in Obama (just as many on the left thought Bush was going to be an American Caesar). And to be sure, there's a decidedly anti-democratic strain in Obama's thinking. He has a certain contempt for democratic norms and the need to engage his political opponents in good faith. He is deeply enamored with the liberal cult of technocratic infallibility (this was one of the main reasons he was so blasé about the implementation of Obamacare; of course the propeller heads will solve it, we're geniuses). Like Tom Friedman, he believes the greatest impediment to social progress is the Neanderthalian refusal of certain Americans to accept that the experts know exactly what to do and how to do it. He openly fantasizes about imposing military obedience on the American people.

And as the author of Liberal Fascism, I think I'm more apt than most to recognize the rough iron underneath the warm and fuzzy exterior of liberalism. But as I've written many times, I don't think we have much reason to fear traditional jack-booted dictators in this country. Ironically, the main reason we don't have to worry about them is that we worry about them so much. An obsessive-compulsive hypochondriac who washes his hands 30 times a day probably doesn't have to worry about getting syphilis, but the greatest guarantee that he won't is his own paranoia about getting it. Deep in American DNA is a visceral aversion to despotism. Sometimes, during a war or other crisis, it can be suspended for a while, but eventually we remember that we just don't like dictators.The bad news is that we don't feel that way -- anymore -- about softer, more diffuse and bureaucratic forms of tyranny. Every American is taught from grade school up that they should fear living in the world of Orwell's 1984. Few Americans can tell you why we shouldn't live in Huxley's Brave New World. We've got the dogmatic muscle and rhetorical sinew to repel militarism, but we're intellectually flabby when it comes to rejecting statist maternalism. We hate hearing "Because I said so!" But we're increasingly powerless against, "It's for your own good!"

(Sadly, the surest route to the 1984-ification of America is to embrace Brave New Worldism. Once you've created a society of men without chests -- in C. S. Lewis's phrase -- you've created a society ripe for a father-figure to make all of the decisions).

For instance, when the national-security types intrude on our privacy or civil liberties, even theoretically, all of the "responsible" voices in the media and academia wig out. But when Obamacare poses a vastly more intrusive and real threat to our privacy, the same people yawn and roll their eyes at anyone who complains. If the District of Columbia justified its omnipresent traffic cameras as an attempt to keep tabs on dissidents, they'd be torn down in a heartbeat by mobs of civil libertarians. But when justified on the grounds of public safety (or revenue for social services or as a way to make driving cars more difficult), well, that's different.

And it is different. Motives matter. But at the same time, I do wish we looked a bit more like the America Edmund Burke once described:

In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; [In America] they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

King Obama

Charlie Cooke has a great column today making a very similar point to what I had intended to start the G-File with: Obama's not a dictator; he's a king. And when I say he's a king, I don't mean the dictatorial kind of an absolute monarchy. I mean he's like the king in a parliamentary democracy where the prime minister has all of the power and the monarch is supposed to mug for postcards and inspire elementary-school children. He's less Longshanks and more King Ralph. At least whenever he's expected to take responsibility, he becomes a figurehead who gives voice to the public's outrage over the problems he himself created. "Nobody is angrier," Obama routinely insists, about the crap people should be angry at him about. As Charlie puts it, "Obama is less Julius Caesar than he is a tribune of the plebs -- an Oprahfied avatar that has been custom-designed both to indulge and guide the public sentiment like so many Bill Clintons feeling your pain."

He's always changing costumes to play the role that political necessity requires of him, which means he has more wardrobe changes than a Vegas drag queen's one-"woman" tribute to Cher.

Always Running for a Job He Already Has

The only thing Barack Obama knows how to do is be Barack Obama. He thinks that's his job, like a king whose only real responsibility is to be kingly. The problem is that the one person (who matters, at least) who doesn't understand this is Barack Obama. As he once said, Obama believes his own bull***t. Charlie offers some good examples of Obama's own Olympian self-regard. For instance:

"I think I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters," Obama told him. "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director."

Though I immediately thought of this bit from New York magazine:

Emanuel's ad-hocracy, meanwhile, didn't faze Obama. The president's friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett sometimes pointed out that not only had he never managed an operation, he'd never really had a nine-to-five job in his life. Obama didn't know what he didn't know, yet his self-confidence was so stratospheric that once, in the context of thinking about Emanuel's replacement, he remarked in all seriousness, "You know, I'd make a good chief of staff."

Those overhearing the comment somehow managed to suppress their laughter.

Obviously, Obama always has a healthy ego, in the same way Godzilla had a healthy physique and the sun has a healthy mass. But part of the problem stems from the fact that he cannot see the difference between campaigning and governing. That would be bad enough, if it were not for the fact that Obama seems to think that he ran his campaign. As I noted the other day in the Corner, here's Obama's response to the charge that Sarah Palin had more executive experience than he did:

Barack Obama: Well, you know, my understanding is that, uh, Governor Palin's town of Wasilly [sic] has, uh, 50 employees, uh, uh, we've got 2,500, uh, in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. Uh, uh, we have a budget of about three times that just for the month. Uh, so I think that, uh, our ability to manage large systems, uh, and to, uh, execute, uh, I think has been made clear over the last couple of years. Uh, and certainly, in terms of, uh, the legislation that I've passed just dealing with this issue post-Katrina, uh, of how we handle emergency management. The fact that, uh, many of my recommendations were adopted and are being put in place, uh, as we speak indicates the extent to which we can provide the kinds of support and good service that the American people expect.

The remarkable thing about this is that there's no real executive experience in his explication of his executive experience. Yes, the candidate can fire people from the campaign. But being the candidate and being the campaign manager are as different as being the lead singer for Spinal Tap and being the band's manager. On the campaign trail, Obama's job was to "be Barack Obama," to sound smart and charismatic and rev up the crowds. He's still playing that part rather than fulfilling the job description.

And no one will tell him. That's why, I suspect, when he went to check on the progress of the site's development he had no idea how to ask questions that would get at the reality of the situation. Bureaucrats, apparatchiks, and contractors blow smoke. That's what they do. Obama has no idea how to cut through the smoke. He thinks being president involves constantly going out and giving speeches to crowds that love him about how hard he's working rather than actually, you know, working. It's all very meta. He's playing president Obama because he doesn't know how to be president Obama. I think that when he went out on Monday and did his infomercial schtick in the Rose Garden -- Operators are standing by! It's not just a website; it's a floorwax! etc. -- he honestly thought he was fixing the problem. Well, I've done my part!

The Unbearable Lightness of ObamaThe president didn't know the NSA was spying on world leaders, but he's found time for at least 146 rounds of golf.By Bret Stephens Oct. 28, 2013

Is there a method to President Obama's style of leadership, his methods of decision-making, his habits of attention, oversight and follow-through? In recent months I've been keeping a file of stories that might suggest an answer. See what you think.***

"President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn't have been practical to brief him on all of them.

"They added that the president was briefed on and approved of broader intelligence-collection 'priorities,' but that those below him make decisions about specific targets."

—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2013

One of at least 146 rounds of golf this president has played. ASSOCIATED PRESS

"HealthCare.gov is the highest-profile experiment yet in the Obama administration's effort to modernize government by using technology, with the site intended to become a user-friendly pathway to new health insurance options for millions of uninsured Americans.

"'This was the president's signature project and no one with the right technology experience was in charge,' said Bob Kocher, a former White House aide who helped draft the law."

—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2013

"Tensions between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have grown sharply in recent months. President Barack Obama authorized the CIA to provide limited arms to carefully vetted Syrian rebels, but it took months for the program to commence. . . .

"One Western diplomat described Saudi Arabia as eager to be a military partner in what was to have been the U.S.-led military strikes on Syria. As part of that, the Saudis asked to be given the list of military targets for the proposed strikes. The Saudis indicated they never got the information, the diplomat said."

—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 21, 2013

"Besides the Syrian government's gains, there was mounting evidence that Mr. Assad's troops had repeatedly used chemical weapons against civilians.

"Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient and disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry BB.T +1.05% or slouching and chewing gum."

— New York Times, NYT +1.70% Oct. 22, 2013

"On Saturday, as the shutdown drama played out on Capitol Hill, President Obama played golf at Fort Belvoir in Virginia."

— Washington Post, WPO +0.94% Sept. 28, 2013

"For French President François Hollande, it seemed like the perfect response: a lightning-quick strike on Syria to punish the government for an alleged chemical weapons attack.

"But with President Obama's surprise decision to ask Congress for a go-ahead on military action, Hollande has found himself embroiled in political controversy abroad and at home. Instead of vaunting Hollande as a warrior charging off to do battle, critics say he now looks more like a sidekick who was left in the lurch by his American ally."

—Washington Post, Sept. 6, 2013

"The essence of Eisenhower's hidden hand, of course, is that there was real work going on that people didn't know at the time. If that's true now, then Obama really is emulating Ike. If, on the other hand, he's simply doing nothing or very little, that would be passivity, not hidden-hand leadership."

—Eisenhower biographer Jim Newton, quoted in New York Times, July 15, 2013

"In polo shirt, shorts and sandals, President Obama headed to the golf course Friday morning with a couple of old friends, then flew to Camp David for a long weekend. Secretary of State John Kerry was relaxing at his vacation home in Nantucket.

"Aides said both men were updated as increasingly bloody clashes left dozens dead in Egypt, but from outward appearances they gave little sense that the Obama administration viewed the broader crisis in Cairo with great alarm."

—New York Times, July 5, 2013

"The president had a truly disturbing habit of funneling major foreign-policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisors whose turf was strictly politics. Their primary concern was how any action in Afghanistan or the Middle East would play on the nightly news, or which talking point it would give Republicans."

— Vali Nasr, "The Dispensable Nation," April 2013

"Mr. Obama's reluctance to put American forces on the ground during the fight, and his decision to keep America's diplomatic and C.I.A. presence minimal in post-Qaddafi Libya, may have helped lead the United States to miss signals and get caught unaware in the attack on the American mission in Benghazi. Military forces were too far from Libya's shores during the Sept. 11 attack to intervene."

—New York Times, Nov. 17, 2012

"For the people who go out, on to the edge, to represent our country, we believe that if we get in trouble, they're coming to get us, that our back is covered. To hear that it's not, that's a terrible, terrible experience."

"Obama Reportedly Unaware NSA Spied on 35 World Leaders"--headline, ABCNews.com, Oct. 28--------------------------- They don't have a headline for it, but wasn't he also unaware of a planned, sophisticated terror attack on the Benghazi compound all the way up to the election?

No question he was aware that putt should have broken right in the previous photo. We know what he looks like when he puts his full attention into it.

Obama administration knew millions could not keep their health insurance

By Lisa Myers and Hannah Rappleye, NBC News

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC News that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”----------------------

Obamacare supporter Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune:" that’s one of those political lies, you know." [ If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance.]

"He said it repeatedly in a political campaign that he won, so that’s what a political lie is all about, right?"

HH: Do you think he’s telling us the truth, or is he lying again about not knowing that Merkel’s calls were being tapped?

Posted on November 1, 2013 by John Hinderaker, PowerlineLies of Obamacare, Documented

Over the last day or two, the major breaking story has really been a throwback: in 2010, the Obama administration promulgated rules governing what plans that pre-existed Obamacare would be “grandfathered” under that statute, and allowed to continue. In the context of announcing its rules, the administration predicted that because of their restrictiveness, many millions of Americans would lose their existing insurance coverage, whether they liked it or not. Further, it has been widely reported (as by CNN, here) that Republicans tried to reverse the administration’s “grandfather” rules so that those who liked their insurance would be allowed to keep it, but Senate Democrats voted them down.

Given the lies with which Obamacare was promoted–”If you like your health care plan, you can keep it”–this is of course a blockbuster story. So I spent some time today tracking down the original sources to verify it.

The Obamacare statute provided that plans pre-existing the law would be allowed to continue, but left the details to future administrative action. That came on June 17, 2010, when the Obama administration–specifically, the Departments of the Treasury, Labor and Health and Human Services–promulgated “Interim Final Rules for Group Health Plans and Health Insurance Coverage Relating to Status as a Grandfathered Health Plan Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” You can read the rules here; scroll down to Part II.

The basic idea underlying the rules is that if the pre-existing plans remained unchanged, they could continue. If, however, there was any significant change in coverages, co-pays, and so on, then the plan would become subject to all of the requirements of Obamacare (even grandfathered plans are subject to a number of Obamacare requirements). The problem is that the health insurance market is constantly changing, and it is typical for plans to change, to some degree, from year to year. So the administration looked at historical data to estimate how many employer-sponsored and individual plans would likely lose their grandfather status once Obamacare was implemented. The administration’s methodology can certainly be questioned, but the results were as has been reported. This chart sums them up; click to enlarge:

The Obama administration projected low-end, mid-range and high-end estimates for how many plans would be terminated, in total and broken down between large and smaller employers. The bottom line is that the administration expected 51% of all employer plans to be terminated as a result of Obamacare. That is the mid-range estimate; the high-end estimate was 69%. So as of 2010, the Obama administration planned that most Americans with employer-sponsored health care plans would lose them, whether they liked those plans or not.

As for individual, as opposed to group plans, the Obama administration said that data were insufficient to predict how many would lose grandfather status, but in any given year the percentage of such policies losing such status would “exceed[] the 40 percent to 67 percent range.”

Those numbers starkly contradict Obama’s “if you like your insurance, you can keep it” assurances. But it is worth noting that the percentage of pre-Obamacare plans that would terminate within the first few years after the law was enacted isn’t the main point. The administration never intended to allow any American to keep a non-Obamacare insurance policy for any length of time. In the Federal Register, the administration candidly acknowledged:

The collective decisions of plan sponsors and issuers over time can be viewed as a one-way sorting process in which these parties decide whether, and when, to relinquish status as a grandfathered health plan.

The administration was prepared to be patient as the “one-way sorting process” ran its course, and all Americans lost the plans they had, whether they liked them or not.

That brings us to September 29, 2010, when Senate Republicans brought to the floor a resolution that would have disapproved of, and reversed, the administrative rules that the Obama administration promulgated on June 17. Wyoming’s Mike Enzi sponsored the resolution; the debate that followed is here. Enzi introduced his resolution:

Mr. President, the resolution we are debating today is about keeping a promise. The authors of the new health care law promised the American people that if they liked their current health insurance, they could keep it. On at least 47 separate occasions, President Obama promised: “If you like what you have, you can keep it.”

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has broken that promise. Earlier this year, the administration published a regulation that will fundamentally change the health insurance plans of millions of Americans. The reality of this new regulation is, if you like what you have, you can’t keep it. The new regulation implemented the grandfathered health plan section of the new health care law. It specified how existing health plans could avoid the most onerous new rules and redtape included in the 2,700 pages of the new health care law. …

Unfortunately, the regulation writers at the Departments of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services broke all those promises. The regulation is crystal clear. Most businesses–the administration estimates between 39 and 69 percent–will not be able to keep the coverage they have.

Under the new regulation, once a business loses grandfathered status, they will have to comply with all of the new mandates in the law. This means these businesses will have to change their current plans and purchase more expensive ones that meet all of the new Federal minimum requirements. For the 80 percent of small businesses that will lose their grandfathered status because of this regulation, the net result is clear: They will pay more for their health insurance.

Does this give you a sense of deja vu, or what? The baleful consequences of Obamacare that we are now seeing–there are many more to come–were known and foreseen in 2010. The Democrats voted down the Republicans’ effort to preserve the health care plans that Americans already like on a party-line vote. The Democrats knew that Obama had been lying through his teeth, and they voted unanimously to sustain his lies.

Did the Democrats have a theory? Sure. They argued that if a health care plan changes significantly, then it isn’t the plan you originally bought. And it is common in a variety of contexts for something that is grandfathered to lose that status if it is changed significantly. But there are several problems with the Democrats’ theory: First, it was entirely different from the assurances Obama gave the American people. You may like your insurance perfectly well after a modest change; you may like it better. But that is irrelevant: if the Obama administration thinks your coverage has changed materially, you lose it. Period. Second, it isn’t true that plans lose their grandfathered status only if they are changed in a major way. For example, if there is any increase in the co-insurance rate, no matter how small, the plan terminates.

Even more significant is the fact that under the administration’s regulations, the plan may stay exactly the same, but if one insurance carrier replaces another, the plan loses its grandfathered status and terminates. The effect of this provision is to eliminate competition and make it less attractive, over time, to maintain pre-existing plans. The Republicans read several letters from business groups into the record, at least one of which pointed out the importance of this provision.

Finally, it should be noted that John McCain, now the bete noire of some activists, weighed in powerfully against the administration’s Obamacare rules. Among other things, he pointed out that they do not apply to unions. They can negotiate changes in the pre-Obamacare plans that cover their members without having them terminate. This is one of the weird features of gangster government: the administration passes terrible laws, and then excuses its friends from complying with them. Let’s turn the floor over to McCain:

Mr. ENZI: According to the administration, in small businesses, 80 percent of the people–unless this [Republican resolution] is passed–will lose the insurance they have and like, and in all businesses 69 percent will. Those are not my numbers; those are the administration’s numbers.

Mr. McCAIN: But isn’t it also true that is the case for small business and people and entrepreneurs all over America except the unions? Isn’t that true? Isn’t this a carve-out again, part of this sleaze that went into putting this bill together, part of the “Cornhusker kickback,” the “Louisiana purchase,” the buying of PhRMA–all that went into this–the “negotiations” that were going to take place on C-SPAN that the President said during the Presidential campaign that went from one sweetheart deal cut to another. Part of one of those sweetheart deals was the unions are exempt; is that correct?

Mr. ENZI. That is correct.

So it’s the usual toxic stew of lies, corruption and incompetence that we have come to expect from Barack Obama. But one last point should not go unmentioned: where has the press been in all of this? As of 2010, it was blindingly obvious–was baldly stated by the Obama administration itself–that under Obamacare, far from being permitted to keep your health care coverage if you like it, most Americans’ policies would speedily be terminated, and all would soon cease to exist. Given the dozens of misrepresentations by Barack Obama and other members of his administration, and given the entirely dishonest basis on which Obamacare was rammed through the Democratic Congress without a single Republican vote, and given that Republicans’ warnings were indisputably coming true–was there not a news story here? How can it be that three more years went by before our one-party media thought to mention what happened back in 2010? One can only imagine how the 2012 election might have been different if the electorate had understood that Obamacare was sold on a scaffold of lies.

The White House on Wednesday declined to challenge an account in a new book that suggests that President Obama, in his campaign to overhaul American health care, mischaracterized a central anecdote about his mother’s deathbed dispute with her insurance company.

During his presidential campaign and subsequent battle over a health care law, Mr. Obama quieted crowds with the story of his mother’s fight with her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition that disqualified her from coverage.

In offering the story as an argument for ending pre-existing condition exclusions by health insurers, the president left the clear impression that his mother’s fight was over health benefits for medical expenses.

But in “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” author Janny Scott quotes from correspondence from the president’s mother to assert that the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument.

In her book, published in May by Riverhead Books, Ms. Scott writes that Mr. Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, had an employer-provided health insurance policy that paid her hospital bills directly, leaving her “to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/obamas-lying-apology.php(Chuck Todd- Pres Obama 24 min. interview)----------- "I regret very much that what we intended to do, which was to make sure that everybody is moving into better plans because they want them as opposed to because they are forced into it, but we weren’t as clear as we needed to be in terms of the changes that were taking place, and I want to do everything we can to make sure that people are finding themselves in a good position, in a better position than they were in before this law happened. And I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me and we’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and that we’re going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this."-----------

Just for the record, what is a sincere apology? You regret what you said or did. You would do it differently if you had the chance to go back. You would do everything in your power to make it right now.

Instead he says it's a 'small percentage of folks' (95 million Americans), 'most of these folks will be better off with a new plan' (twice the price). We did it the best way possible. You will be better off. No real regrets. Until the next apology, much more sincere - if you can believe that!

As I noted last week, in 2010, the Obama administration estimated that 93 million Americans would be unable to keep their prior health coverage under the narrow grandfathering provisions issued by the administration in June 2010. My colleague Chris Conover estimates that the number is 129 million. And we are here only talking about disruptions to private health plans, and not counting the law’s $716 billion in cuts to Medicare.

The level of disruption in the employer-sponsored market will be less than that in the individual market, where people shop for coverage on their own. But the President is most certainly violating his “like your plan” pledge in the employer-sponsored market, too. For example, employer-sponsored insurance will now have to cover costly, federally-dictated benefits that they did not have to cover before, rendering many plans illegal. Excise taxes on premiums, drugs, and medical devices will drive premiums upward. And the so-called “Cadillac tax” on high-value insurance plans—a meritorious idea—will force a massive restructuring of many coverage arrangements.-----------------------

I am patiently waiting for our watchdog media to question what else was he lying about? Perhaps everything economic, for starters?

A Noble Lie?Why ObamaCare is worse than just a case of pathological altruism.By James TarantoNovember 13, 2013

This column has been following with amusement the various equivocations and rationalizations supporters of ObamaCare have offered to avoid acknowledging plainly that Barack Obama's central premise--"If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it"--was an out-and-out fraud. "Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that" is how a New York Times editorial put it last week. The Times's news side seems to have settled on "incorrect promise."

But if the Times editors are in the market for talent, they ought to find out who wrote Sunday's editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. This thing is a masterpiece:

First of all, this is a problem of the president's own making. He did repeatedly say that if you like your insurance plan, you can keep it. He was three words short of the truth. All he had to add was "in most cases."

It's unlikely that this extra frankness would have hurt the political effort to sell the legislation. People understand that not everybody can be left unaffected by such a sweeping change, and Mr. Obama should have been careful not to embellish the assurance.

Was it a lie? He should have known the facts. By definition, a lie is a deliberate misstating of the truth; it is not simply something that was wrongly stated with good intentions, in this case perhaps, to make the complicated simple for public consumption. Those who believe the worst of this president will conclude that he lied; those who do not will be more charitable.

This is savory for multiple reasons. For one, adding a weaselly phrase like "in most cases" does not constitute "extra frankness." Quite the opposite: It turns a shining promise into a foggy assurance with no clear meaning. Imagine if Obama tried that with his wedding vows:

Jeremiah Wright: Will you, Barack, take Michelle to be your wife, to love, honor and cherish, forsaking all others, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?

Obama: Yeah, most likely.

The Post-Gazette's claim that "it is unlikely" such equivocation "would have hurt the political effort to sell the legislation" is supportable only if one assumes the enactment of ObamaCare was not the close-run thing it seemed at the time--in other words, that Harry Reid would have been able to command 60 votes and Nancy Pelosi 218 even without whatever political cover the fraudulent promise provided the Democratic members of their respective chambers. If that is true, however, then the entire "political effort to sell the legislation" was a sham: The fix was in, and Congress was prepared to act with complete disregard for public opinion.

Now for the best part: "By definition, a lie is a deliberate misstating of the truth; it is not simply something that was wrongly stated with good intentions, in this case perhaps, to make the complicated simple for public consumption."

This is a bit of a head-scratcher. The Wall Street Journal established a week earlier that the pledge was the result of careful deliberation between "White House policy advisers" concerned about accuracy and "political aides," who prevailed because, as the Journal paraphrased a comment from an unnamed former official, "in the midst of a hard-fought political debate 'if you like your plan, you can probably keep it' isn't a salable point."

So this was a deliberate misstating of the truth. By raising the possibility of "good intentions," the Post-Gazette editorialists seem to be suggesting that it was a sort of noble lie. "The furor of the supposed great lie is an embarrassment to Mr. Obama," they concede in conclusion, "but it obscures the larger and more important truth that the Affordable Care Act remains good policy."

That evaluation seems increasingly delusional with every passing hour, but let's stipulate for the sake of argument that ObamaCare was a well-intended policy: that Obama pushed for it out of a sincere desire to help people. That would make its failure an example of what the scholar Barbara Oakley calls pathological altruism.

That seems to us, however, to give Obama too much credit. For one thing, it takes more than altruistic motives to justify lying. Suppose one could establish that Bernie Madoff sincerely wanted to make his clients wealthier. Would that mitigate his guilt for defrauding them?

Further, good intentions are not the same as pure intentions. People often have altruistic and selfish motives for the same action. Even if we assume Obama honestly wanted to help people and made his fraudulent promise in pursuit of that goal, it would be silly to deny he also made it in pursuit of his own aggrandizement--of the approbation that comes with a "legacy" of substantial "achievement."

Of course, that's not working out so well for him now. Whether or not this is a case of pathological altruism, it definitely is pathological narcissism.

Fouad Ajami: When the Obama Magic DiedThere were no economic or cultural bonds among his coalition. He was all things to all people. Charisma ruled.By Fouad AjamiNov. 14, 2013 6:59 p.m. ET

The current troubles of the Obama presidency can be read back into its beginnings. Rule by personal charisma has met its proper fate. The spell has been broken, and the magician stands exposed. We need no pollsters to tell us of the loss of faith in Mr. Obama's policies—and, more significantly, in the man himself. Charisma is like that. Crowds come together and they project their needs onto an imagined redeemer. The redeemer leaves the crowd to its imagination: For as long as the charismatic moment lasts—a year, an era—the redeemer is above and beyond judgment. He glides through crises, he knits together groups of varied, often clashing, interests. Always there is that magical moment, and its beauty, as a reference point.

Mr. Obama gave voice to this sentiment in a speech on Nov. 6 in Dallas: "Sometimes I worry because everybody had such a fun experience in '08, at least that's how it seemed in retrospect. And, 'yes we can,' and the slogans and the posters, et cetera, sometimes I worry that people forget change in this country has always been hard." It's a pity we can't stay in that moment, says the redeemer: The fault lies in the country itself—everywhere, that is, except in the magician's performance.

Forgive the personal reference, but from the very beginning of Mr. Obama's astonishing rise, I felt that I was witnessing something old and familiar. My advantage owed nothing to any mastery of American political history. I was guided by my immersion in the political history of the Arab world and of a life studying Third World societies.

In 2008, seeing the Obama crowds in Portland, Denver and St. Louis spurred memories of the spectacles that had attended the rise and fall of Arab political pretenders. I had lived through the era of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser. He had emerged from a military cabal to become a demigod, immune to judgment. His followers clung to him even as he led the Arabs to a catastrophic military defeat in the Six Day War of 1967. He issued a kind of apology for his performance. But his reign was never about policies and performance. It was about political magic.

In trying to grapple with, and write about, the Obama phenomenon, I found guidance in a book of breathtaking erudition, "Crowds and Power" (1962) by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti. (MARC: I have this book-- it is very interesting) Born in Bulgaria in 1905 and educated in Vienna and Britain, Canetti was unmatched in his understanding of the passions, and the delusions, of crowds. The crowd is a "mysterious and universal phenomenon," he writes. It forms where there was nothing before. There comes a moment when "all who belong to the crowd get rid of their difference and feel equal." Density gives the illusion of equality, a blessed moment when "no one is greater or better than another." But the crowd also has a presentiment of its own disintegration, a time when those who belong to the crowd "creep back under their private burdens."

Five years on, we can still recall how the Obama coalition was formed. There were the African-Americans justifiably proud of one of their own. There were upper-class white professionals who were drawn to the candidate's "cool." There were Latinos swayed by the promise of immigration reform. The white working class in the Rust Belt was the last bloc to embrace Mr. Obama—he wasn't one of them, but they put their reservations aside during an economic storm and voted for the redistributive state and its protections. There were no economic or cultural bonds among this coalition. There was the new leader, all things to all people.

A nemesis awaited the promise of this new presidency: Mr. Obama would turn out to be among the most polarizing of American leaders. No, it wasn't his race, as Harry Reid would contend, that stirred up the opposition to him. It was his exalted views of himself, and his mission. The sharp lines were sharp between those who raised his banners and those who objected to his policies.

America holds presidential elections, we know. But Mr. Obama took his victory as a plebiscite on his reading of the American social contract. A president who constantly reminded his critics that he had won at the ballot box was bound to deepen the opposition of his critics.

A leader who set out to remake the health-care system in the country, a sixth of the national economy, on a razor-thin majority with no support whatsoever from the opposition party, misunderstood the nature of democratic politics. An election victory is the beginning of things, not the culmination. With Air Force One and the other prerogatives of office come the need for compromise, and for the disputations of democracy. A president who sought consensus would have never left his agenda on Capitol Hill in the hands of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

Mr. Obama has shown scant regard for precedent in American history. To him, and to the coterie around him, his presidency was a radical discontinuity in American politics. There is no evidence in the record that Mr. Obama read, with discernment and appreciation, of the ordeal and struggles of his predecessors. At best there was a willful reading of that history. Early on, he was Abraham Lincoln resurrected (the new president, who hailed from Illinois, took the oath of office on the Lincoln Bible). He had been sworn in during an economic crisis, and thus he was FDR restored to the White House. He was stylish with two young children, so the Kennedy precedent was on offer.

In the oddest of twists, Mr. Obama claimed that his foreign policy was in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower's . But Eisenhower knew war and peace, and the foreign world held him in high regard.

During his first campaign, Mr. Obama had paid tribute to Ronald Reagan as a "transformational" president and hinted that he aspired to a presidency of that kind. But the Reagan presidency was about America, and never about Ronald Reagan. Reagan was never a scold or a narcissist. He stood in awe of America, and of its capacity for renewal. There was forgiveness in Reagan, right alongside the belief in the things that mattered about America—free people charting their own path.

If Barack Obama seems like a man alone, with nervous Democrats up for re-election next year running for cover, and away from him, this was the world he made. No advisers of stature can question his policies; the price of access in the Obama court is quiescence before the leader's will. The imperial presidency is in full bloom.

There are no stars in the Obama cabinet today, men and women of independent stature and outlook. It was after a walk on the White House grounds with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, that Mr. Obama called off the attacks on the Syrian regime that he had threatened. If he had taken that walk with Henry Kissinger or George Shultz, one of those skilled statesmen might have explained to him the consequences of so abject a retreat. But Mr. Obama needs no sage advice, he rules through political handlers.

Valerie Jarrett, the president's most trusted, probably most powerful, aide, once said in admiration that Mr. Obama has been bored his whole life. The implication was that he is above things, a man alone, and anointed. Perhaps this moment—a presidency coming apart, the incompetent social engineering of an entire health-care system—will now claim Mr. Obama's attention.

— Mr. Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, is the author, most recently, of "The Syrian Rebellion" ( Hoover Press, 2012).

Moving on from healthcare lies, Benghazi lies, IRS targeting lies, fast and furious lies, and lies about his failed economic policies, President Obama aimed his weekly address at energy production - that he opposes!

Dear Reader (and all conservatives everywhere who apparently are still to blame for a Communist assassin in Dallas 50 years ago today), I am growing increasingly fascinated by the world-historic craptacular face plant that is HealthCare.gov. You would think it would be the opposite. You'd think that after a month of near-constant argle-bargle and foofaraw it would lose its appeal. But it's more like watching Anchorman over and over again; every time you find something to reward the effort.

An article in Time magazine in June -- June! -- reported that Denis McDonough, the president's chief of staff, spent "two hours a day" on Obamacare implementation.Let that sink in.

Two hours a day. In the time-based economy of the White House, that's an unfathomable fortune. Taking out my temporal currency converter, that's equivalent to getting a sit down with Don Corleone on his daughter's wedding day for an entire afternoon. It's like Kathryn Lopez getting a papal visit that lasts the entire week of Easter. It'd be like me going on a road trip with Rupert Murdoch and Joss Whedon in which we taste-test every baseball-park hotdog in the United States. In short, that is what students of the inside-the-Beltway space-time continuum call "some serious quality time."

And yet, somehow, McDonough was caught off guard by the extent of HealthCare.gov's craptacularity? How is that possible? It's like going to Tokyo on a fact-finding trip and reporting back that the air quality is surprisingly poor but otherwise everything is fine -- without mentioning the three-day donnybrook between Godzilla and the Smog Monster.

Direct Information?

But even if that was an exaggeration, and McDonough wasn't spending two hours a day every day dealing with the nitty-gritty of Obamacare, it's still hard to get my head around the idea that he was totally in the dark about the problems. And if he wasn't in the dark one can only assume that the president wasn't either. The central job of any chief of staff is to control the flow of information to the president. And yet president Obama says, "I was not informed directly that the website would not be working, as the way it was supposed to."

I've been trying to think through what that means. Did McDonough stage an inscrutably Ibsenesque puppet show about the site's troubles? Maybe they played a game of telephone in the Oval Office which began with McDonough whispering in Valerie Jarrett's ear, "The website isn't going to work by October 1," but by the time the phrase worked its way around the horn, Jay Carney whispered with his school-girl giggle, "I will have cabbage in my trousers this Wednesday." Sure, everyone laughed when Obama repeated, "I will have cabbage in my trousers this Wednesday," so maybe McDonough just didn't have it in him to ruin the good time by telling him what the original phrase was? Or maybe something else is going on?

I know my Schadenfreudarama piece was a bit on the Gonzo side (which is where I will sit at the wedding when Gonzo and Camilla finally tie the knot), but I was quite serious when I was talking about President Obama's hubris. Hubris doesn't just mean overweening pride or self-confidence. It's when arrogant people believe the rules don't apply to them. And I don't mean that in the hypocritical sense. Hubris isn't hypocrisy. Aristocrats who insist the peasants must never rip off their mattress tags but think it's fine for the nobility to slumber deep in the comfort of a tag-free mattress may be hypocrites, but that's not hubris. (And since that was an incredibly dumb sentence . . . ) Nor is it hubris when liberals insist the little people shouldn't have guns, or cars, or use planes, or eat fatty food, because only the elite can be trusted to make those kinds of choices for themselves.

Hubris, at least in part, is when you think the rules of the universe really don't apply to you. Hubris is when you think you are anointed by God, Providence, the Matrix, or your own inner spark of awesomeness to the point where you think you can get out of any knotty situation just because you're you. Playing the odds is for little people.I remember when I first looked up the word -- I was reading one of the Dune books (Shai Hulud! I loved those books). One of Frank Herbert's big ideas was the inherent tension between hubris and revelation. Take it from a guy named Jonah, it takes a lot of self-confidence and certainty to be a prophet. "Yes, hello people of Ninevah. God sent me. What? No, I don't have any paperwork on that. But you're going to have to stop all of this tomfoolery. Right now. I'm serious you guys."

In literature there are countless examples of hubris. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Dr. F thinks he can play God. In Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, a different Dr. F thinks he can make a deal with the devil and not pay a price. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Oedipus thinks he can go swimming less than a half hour after eating ("I think you need to reread that one" -- The Couch).

But I think the best example of the kind of hubris I have in mind can be found in the scene from The Other Guys where Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson think they're such super-terrific badasses they can leap from a rooftop and they'll be okay if they simply "aim for the bushes."

Which is to say there's a very fine line between self-confidence and stupid. This is a lesson most cocky children learn when they think they can take off their pants without removing their shoes first. But apparently for some people it's the sort of lesson one has to learn by taking over one sixth of the U.S. economy.

Unknown Unknowns

I know a lot of people made fun of Don Rumsfeld -- though I never really understood why -- but his saying about "unknown unknowns" is really one of the most profound and pithy distillations of a core insight to human existence we've seen in a long time.

(I can think of only two recent competitors off the top of my head right now. The first is Arthur Brooks's insight about the importance of "earned success." The other is Charles Murray's summation of what is wrong with the meritocratic elite in this country: They refuse to "preach what they practice." But those are topics for another day.)Rumsfeld captured both the Socratic insight that a wise man knows he always has more to learn and the Chestertonian paradox of the fence. If you don't know about Chesterton's fence after years of reading this "news"letter I haven't been doing my job ("I've been meaning to ask about that. What exactly do you do?" -- The Couch).

The money quote:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

Obama's Fences

The question -- which really isn't a question -- of Obama's narcissism is one of the most masticated morsels of pundit cud in the op-ed feed trough. There's no need to revisit it here. Suffice it to say, Obama thinks he's kind of a big deal.

But while the psychological term for Obama's stunning self-regard may indeed be "narcissism" I think it's really hubris, specifically the kind of hubris that comes with the blinding conviction that there are no unknown unknowns that a man of his abilities can't handle. A messianic figure doesn't need to sweat the small stuff, because messiahs by definition are immune to the small stuff.

There are now scores of quotes and anecdotes about how Obama has said to aides and allies something like "don't worry about the politics . . . I'll handle the politics." Remember when that Arkansas congressman rightly feared that the passage of Obamacare would trigger a replay of the 1994 shellacking of Democrats? Obama responded that the big difference between '94 and 2010 was "you've got me." When he was looking for a new chief of staff, he remarked that he'd make a great chief of staff. During one of the budget battles he said everything would be easier if he could do it all by himself. He's whined that Chinese autocrats have a much easier time. A couple weeks ago, Obama said that he'd fix the website himself except "I don't write code."

Right. Because if Obama knew Fortran or C++ he'd just be able to roll up his sleeves and bang that thing out. He's just that good. Remember he's a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, better policy guy than his policy guy, yada yada yada. He can cook twelve-minute brownies in seven minutes, bitches.

By the way, my favorite recent example of Obama's stunning ego-centrism came in this Fresh Air interview a friend forwarded me. Terry Gross interviewed the hosts of Key & Peele. Here's the relevant bit:

GROSS: Jordan, when you met President Obama, which I know you did, did you get some insights into how to perform him?PEELE: I would say so, yeah. I think I walked out of there a little bit more confident with my impression, and I actually did it for him at one point. He says, you know, I do a pretty good me myself . . .

If I had my postmodern-narcissism-irony Geiger counter in the room when that happened it would explode like a phaser set to overload.

Valerie Jarrett's power is reportedly derived from the fact that she knows how Obama ticks and knows how to tell him the things he wants -- needs! -- to hear. So consider this infamous insight:

I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He's been bored to death his whole life. He's just too talented to do what ordinary people do.

I've met some of the smartest people in America, literally. I don't for a moment claim to be one of them, but I've been in the room with a bunch of them. Truly brilliant people aren't bored like that. They find ways to challenge themselves.

No, Obama's problem is that the only thing that really engages his full attention is . . . Barack Obama. That's why his books are about -- wait for it -- Barack Obama. When it came to his political career he was willing to do the legwork, because it was about advancing him. He loves campaigning but is bored with governing because campaigning is about him and governing is, by definition, about other people. And other people aren't interesting -- unless of course they are the ones we've been waiting for, i.e. the ones who love Barack Obama.

Back to the Website

Obama says he wasn't "directly informed" about the website's problems. But Jay Carney revealed the president was briefed in March about the McKinsey report. He was told of the "red flags," he just wasn't told how serious those red flags were. As brother Geraghty writes:

Now . . . think about it. If you're President Obama, this is your baby. This is your legacy. Draw a parallel to anything big and important that you've done in your life in the past: a big project at work, a home improvement project, writing a book, planning a wedding. This is vitally important, surpassed only by the needs of your family and your own health.

Suddenly someone informs you that something might be going wrong with this hugely important project.

Even if that person says, "don't worry, we're handling it," . . . aren't you a little concerned at that point? It doesn't trigger a bit of worry? Don't you follow up? If they say, "eh, look, it's technical," doesn't your intense concern about the project's success get you to drill down, and get into the weeds?

How do you shrug off something like that? I know the president is a busy man with a full schedule -- I can hear you chuckling about playing golf from here -- but don't you think he would have asked about those potential problems in subsequent meetings about Obamacare? Wouldn't that have nagged at him?

You'd think, yeah. But here's the thing: Obama's like the dog from the Far Side cartoon. You can talk about red flags and broken data hubs all day long and all he'll hear is "blah blah blah blah Obama blah blah blah." Having never run anything, he doesn't even know how to ask questions that any half-way decent manager would ask when it's clear the staff is screwing the pooch. It's not even clear he can tell when the staff is screwing the pooch, even when a naked staffer is standing in front of him with an extremely discomfited canine.

The Arrogance of Liberalism

This isn't just about the man, it's about his ideology. Liberalism has no respect for fences it doesn't understand. No appreciation for the law of unintended consequences. Obama doesn't have the imagination to worry about serious unknown unknowns, never mind known unknowns. When he was campaigning for the stimulus, he'd talk endlessly about "shovel-ready jobs," making it sound like only idiots and fools questioned the existence of such things. Six months later, he was the one who discovered shovel-ready jobs weren't shovel ready. Just this month he discovered that buying health insurance is complicated.

It's like the "you can keep your plan, period" lie. It's impossible to know if he really truly knew it was a lie, or if he thought it was sort of true. The important point is that he's so intellectually incurious he didn't take the time to figure it out. Days before the website went live he was still promising it would work perfectly.

And that's where the hubris comes in. No matter what the circumstance, no matter the potential downside, no matter how loudly God is laughing at his plans, Obama ignorantly strides on in his giant hamster sphere of epistemic closure, thinking that whatever happens he'll be okay, because, "you've got me" as if that will make all the difference. And it never does.

“The problem is that I’m president of the United States; I’m not emperor,”

“We underestimated the complexities of building a website,”

“The private sector is doing fine,”

"OK, on the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to. Had I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, ‘Boy, this is going to be great.’ I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, ‘This is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity’ a week before the website opens if I thought that it wasn’t going to work. So clearly, we and I did not have enough awareness about the problems in the website."

[Wait: Were you informed indirectly?]

“We live in the greatest nation in the history of the world,” “I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it.”

“If I had a son he’d look like Trayvon.”

“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them,”

"...the Obama White House isn’t organized. It’s just full of chatter. Meetings don’t begin on time, there’s no agenda, the list of those invited seems to expand and contract at somebody’s whim. There is a tendency to speak of how a problem will look and how its appearance should be handled, as opposed to what the problem is and should be done about it. "..."...when you apply this to the ObamaCare debacle, suddenly it seems to make sense. The White House is so unformed and chaotic that they probably didn’t ignore the problem, they probably held a million meetings on it. People probably said things like, “We’re experiencing some technological challenges but we’re sure we’ll be up by October,” and other people said, “Yes, it’s important we launch strong,” and others said, “The Republicans will have a field day if we’re not.” And then everyone went to their next meeting. And no one did anything. And the president went off and made speeches."..."If they thought he wasn’t very bright, they might give him some leeway on that question. [Lying, not knowing etc.] But they think he’s really smart. So they think he knew. And deliberately misled."

To the above in the thread, yes, the man who lied about his mom who it turns out had full coverage in her battle with cancer, lied about not knowing his uncle. He in fact lived with him, but - "his staff got it wrong".

The fault with Obama's big governmenthealthcare trainwreck is not with his leadership, but the fault of big government:

The President landed a much needed break from the downward spiraling news cycle with the death of his pretend mentor, Nelson Mandela:

But isn't Mandela truly the anti- or opposite of Obama? On the non-stop coverage I noted the word patience. 28 years in prison suffering for his cause, and most deserving of leadership when his time finally came. In leadership, he was known for healing, compromising, forgiving, and coming together with his former captors.

In contrast is the guy from choomgang and Ivy League affirmative action college subsidies, who never suffered but gave a speech, "Harry, I have a gift", won the Nobel prize before appointing his staff, refused to negotiate with political foes, didn't want or need a single vote of the opposition, shut down the government to avoid negotiating on his signature failure. The ends always justify means; he praised Lincoln, emulated Nixon. Ideology means everything, his word means nothing. His legacy, well we will see, but appears to be the discrediting of his own policies and the bringing together, strengthening and the vindicating of his opponents. It took this president until his second sentence eulogizing Nelson Mandela to start in with the word "I".

“I am one of the countless millions who drew inspiration from Nelson Mandela’s life," Obama said. "Like so many around the globe, I cannot imagine my own life without the example that Nelson Mandela set." He added: "So long as I live, I will do whatever I can to learn from him."

“I am one of the countless millions who drew inspiration from Nelson Mandela’s life," Obama said. "Like so many around the globe, I cannot imagine my own life without the example that Nelson Mandela set." He added: "So long as I live, I will do whatever I can to learn from him."

Obama really has no class whatsoever.

Clinton is the same way with something like "Obama got the big things right. He gets the easy things wrong". or something like that.

I don't know who is more narcissistic or self serving. It really is a tie.

One difference is Clinton just wants to be loved. Obama (already loves himself) is an angry man on a vengeance vendetta.

See the NY Times pdf of the original article. He could see the "goodness in humanity" by the turnout and enthusiasm at SAM, Students Against Militarism Thursday night. SAM had 15 members, none of which controlled the arsenal of the Soviet Union then or Iran today. I am curious if Bill Ayers wrote this too.

(Now he refuses to stop nuclear proliferation to dictators and terrorists.)

By Harack Obama our hearts. and taking continual, tangi- on the nuclear threat-reveals a deep Most students at Columbia do not ble ~teps to prevent war, becomes a di- resevoir ofconcern. "I think students onhave first hand knowledge of war_ Mili- fficult task. this campus like to think of themselvestary violence has been a vicarious ex- Two groups on campus, Anns Race as sophisticated, and don't appreciateperience, channeled into our minds Alternatives (ARA) and Students small vision, So they tend to come outthrough television, film, and print. Ag-ainst Militarism (SAM), work within more for the events; they do not want to The more sensitive ~lmong us these mental limits to foster awareness just fold leaflets."struggle to extrapolate experiences of and practical action neces::-ary to coun- Mark Bigelow, a graduate internwar from our everyday experience, dis- ter the growing threat of war. Though from Union Theological Seminary whocussing the latest mortality statistics the emphasis of the two p:roups differ. works with Don to keep ARA runningfrom Guatemala, sensitizing ourselves they share an aversion to current gov- smoothly, agrees. "It seems that stu-to our parents' wartime memories, or ernment policy. These groups, visualiz- dents here are fairly aware of the nucle-incorporating into our framework ofreˇ ing the possibilities of destruction and ar problem, and it makes for an underly-ality as depicted by a Mailer or a Cop- g-rasping the-tendencies of distorted na- ing frustration. We try to talk to thatpola. But the taste of war-the sounds tional priorities, are throwing their frustration." Consequently. the thrust ofand chill, the dead bodies-are remote weight into shifting America off the ARA is towards generating dialogueand far removed. We know that wars dead-end track. which will give people a rational handlehave OlX.'WTed, will occur, are occWTing, "Most people my age remember on this controversial subject. this inc-but bringing such experience down into well the air-raid drills in school, under ludes bringing speakers like Daniel